Brand Photography Image Audit: What Do You Actually Need?
BEFORE YOU BOOK ANOTHER SHOOT
September always feels like a bit of a reset to me. The summer is over, everyone is properly back at their desks (either refreshed or exhausted!) and suddenly there are three good months ahead to get things moving before Christmas.
If you're starting to think about your marketing for the next few months — and the photography you might need to support it — there's one thing I'd do first.
Audit what you've already got.
Not because you don't need new photography. Quite the opposite. Knowing exactly what you already have makes it much easier to see what you need to create next. And it doesn't need to be complicated.
1. GET EVERYTHING INTO ONE PLACE
This sounds incredibly basic, but you'd be amazed how often photography is scattered everywhere. My client images are meticulously organised, but those I want for my social media... another matter!
A Dropbox link from one shoot. A folder on somebody's desktop from another. Headshots in the website folder. Event photographs buried in emails. A few useful phone photographs that nobody else in the business even knows exist.
Start by pulling together everything you're still entitled to use and putting it somewhere accessible to the people who actually need it. Then create a folder structure that makes sense for your business. That might be by year, shoot, team member, service, product, location or content type.
The important thing is that six months from now, somebody other than you can find what they're looking for.
2. RENAME THE FILES
This is the deeply unglamorous bit that you'll thank yourself for later. A folder containing IMG_4297.jpg, IMG_4298.jpg and another 200 variations isn't particularly useful when you're trying to find the photograph of Sarah presenting at an event.
Give your images descriptive, searchable names. Think about the words you or somebody in your team would actually type when looking for them: the person's name, the service, the location, the type of image or the shoot. It doesn't have to be an elaborate system. It just needs to make finding things easier.
And don't forget to tag the photographer in, Copyright Law is real, and you don't want a tricky situation on your hands!
3. LOOK AT EVERYTHING TOGETHER
Now stop looking at individual photographs and look at the library as a whole. Does it feel like one business?
Look at lighting, colour, editing, locations, backgrounds, clothing and overall style. There should be enough consistency that your imagery feels recognisably yours.
This is also where older photography can suddenly stand out. Perhaps your branding has changed, your team has grown, your positioning has moved on or the business simply looks and feels different now. None of that necessarily makes the old photographs bad. They just might not be telling the same story anymore.
Different photographers also have different editing styles and having warm 'tea-stained' images alongside a light and bright editing style can be a sure-fire way to make your site or socials look cheap and unprofessional.
4. CHECK WHAT YOU'VE ACTUALLY COVERED
This is where I'd start getting quite practical.
Do you have current, consistent photography of every member of the team?
Does each of your key services or products have imagery to support it?
Have you got photographs of people actually doing what they do, rather than just a collection of headshots?
What about your environment, interiors, products, details, client experience or behind-the-scenes elements?
If someone landed on your website or Instagram knowing absolutely nothing about your business, could your photography help them understand what you actually do?
And do you have images to demonstrate the key messages you want to portray?
5. CHECK YOUR FORMATS
This one gets forgotten surprisingly often.
You can have a gorgeous library of photographs and still struggle to use it if they're all composed in exactly the same way.
Look at whether you have a useful mixture of:
portrait and vertical images for social media
landscape images for websites, LinkedIn and editorial use
wider photographs with space for text
tighter crops and details
images that work at different sizes
photographs with subjects positioned to the left, right and centre
You're not just auditing what is in the photographs. You're looking at how useful they are.
6. LOOK FOR THE GAPS
Now look ahead.
What are you going to be talking about over the next three months? Perhaps you're launching something new, introducing a team member, pushing a particular service, updating your website, pitching for press, planning Christmas content or simply trying to show more of the people behind the business.
Do you have the photography to support it? Make an actual list of what's missing.
And that's where the audit becomes particularly useful, because instead of approaching your next brand shoot with a vague sense that you need "some fresh images", you're starting with a much clearer picture of what you already have, what isn't working anymore and where the gaps are.
You don't necessarily need to work out exactly how to fill all of those gaps yourself, either. Find a photographer who has experience in brand messaging: someone who doesn't simply turn up and photograph the list you've handed them, but who takes the time to understand your business, look at what you already have and helps you work out what the next shoot actually needs to achieve.
That, in my humble opinion, should be a big part of the work that happens before the camera ever comes out. Sometimes the original idea for a shoot is absolutely right; sometimes, once you've looked at the bigger picture, you realise there is a much better way to use the time.
That way your next shoot isn't simply adding another few hundred photographs to an already slightly chaotic collection. It's filling the gaps deliberately and creating an image library that's genuinely useful for the business you're building.
Venetia x